Uwe Hermann - pluginhttp://hermann-uwe.de/taxonomy/term/1803/0
enDownload videos from Youtube, Google Video and others using Linux [Update]http://hermann-uwe.de/blog/download-videos-from-youtube-google-video-and-others-using-linux
<p>Many online video sites such as <a href="http://youtube.com/">Youtube</a>, <a href="http://video.google.com/">Google Video</a>, <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com">Dailymotion</a>, <a href="http://www.metacafe.com/">Metacafe</a>, and others only provide limited or inconvenient access to the videos; either they require you to install the proprietary Flash player (and I surely won't do that), and/or you can only view them online (but not download them).</p>
<p>There are some solutions, each with advantages and disadvantages:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/">youtube-dl</a>, a command line script to download Youtube videos.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/metacafe-dl/">metacafe-dl</a>, same as above but for Metacafe videos.</li>
<li><a href="http://home.gna.org/clive/">clive</a>, a command line tool (with optional newt UI) for Youtube, Google Video (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=430433">seems defunct at the moment</a>) and Dailymotion.</li>
<li><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2390">VideoDownloader</a>, a Firefox plugin which is supposed to work with more than 60 video sites (Youtube and Google Video are among them). The only disadvantage compared to the other solutions: you need to start Firefox + X11 (no pure command line usage).</li>
<li><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2254">UnPlug</a>, a Firefox plugin similar to VideoDownloader, but with the advantage that it doesn't use the VideoDownloader web service (but rather figures out the video URLs itself).</li>
<li><a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">Gnash</a>, a free software Flash video player is another option, but AFAICS it's not yet ready for daily usage (but it's getting there).</li>
<li><a href="http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/">swfdec</a>, another Free Software Flash player, is actually working quite nice with Youtube already.</li>
</ul>
<p>After the download, you can either view the videos using (e.g.) mplayer, or recode them into a more sane format. For all of the above programs there are Debian packages available, except for VideoDownloader/UnPlug (but you can easily install those from within Firefox).</p>
<p><strong style="color:#ff0000">Update 2007-07-26:</strong> Added UnPlug and swfdec (thanks Joe Buck and Josh Triplet for the comments).</p>
http://hermann-uwe.de/blog/download-videos-from-youtube-google-video-and-others-using-linux#commentscliveflashgnashgooglemetacafe-dlplayerpluginvideovideodownloaderyoutubeyoutube-dlTue, 24 Jul 2007 22:56:53 +0200Uwe Hermann1276 at http://hermann-uwe.de